[Corpora-List] estimates of written/spoken input

From: Marco Baroni (baroni@sslmit.unibo.it)
Date: Sun Nov 27 2005 - 12:59:06 MET

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    Dear all,

    Does anybody know of studies that present estimates of how many words (or
    sentences, or utterances, etc.) an "average" adult human being hears and/or
    reads during a certain time span (days, months, years, etc.)? I realize
    that this is problematic (what is a word? who counts as "average adult"? in
    which anguage? etc.), but I would be happy even with very rough ballpark
    estimates.

    I am interested in this because I would like to know to what extent a
    corpus the size of the BNC (or even larger) can be seen (of course, again,
    with all sorts of methodolocial caveats) as a surrogate for the amount of
    linguistic input that the average adult human receives in a certain period
    of time...

    I am aware of an estimate that fifth-graders read about 1M words per year
    (quoted in Anglin: Vocabulary development: A morphological analysis
    (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1993) -- I
    don't have the book with me right now, so I could be wrong regarding the
    grade and/or the amount of words...), but I've found nothing about adults.

    Thanks in advance.

    Regards,

    Marco 

    -- 
Marco Baroni
SSLMIT, University of Bologna
http://sslmit.unibo.it/~baroni

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